I've been visiting your forums for about two weeks now, but just browsing and reading the interesting and useful information you have here. Thanks for that.

Sorry if i'm doing this on the wrong forums, but i would like to ask for assistance with choosing a good antivirus. (million dollar question?)

I purchased ESET for my home computers some time ago. However, i've been hearing of the Microsoft Windows Essentials being a good antivirus and of course being free. Then you also hear of the big ones such as Norton, Mcafee, Kaerspy, and so on.

My school of thought on this is that some are better, some are no good, but they are mostly all the same. They want you to spend money, but then you are never fully protected, or not for long anyway.

But maybe i am wrong, so i would like to ask whether there is an antivirus out there that really is better at preventing and/or dealing with viruses than others. Or if it just depends on how much you are willing to spend, and a "throw a rock and take your pick" kind of thing.

Do you guys know anything about this Windows antivirus? I also believe it should be a combination of having an antivirus and spyware/malware protection that would provide the best chance of being protected?

I don't think that there a single solution for everyone. I tend to go for something light weight. This rules out Symantec and McAfee for me. I've had good results with AVG and Kaspersky in the past. They have some decent management tools, but the software is not overbearing. Some people trust the names of Symantec and McAfee. Some people like the features. I think that you are going to get many different responses with many different reasons.

I think that AV software that catches the most is one that uses multiple engines. I believe that F-Secure is one of the products that uses multiple engines. I have never used it though.

Just to add my $.02... my simple statement is that the best AV is one that will be used. Like Ketchup said, he doesn't like the bloated suites from the big guys. So even though they may offer more, the smaller footprint offerings he would. I had this same discussion with an employee of CompTIA. He asked me the same question and mentioned not liking notifications, email addendums, ads blah blah blah. He also didn't want to spend any money on a solution. So the only thing I coul think of that met his requirements and would be USED, was Microsoft Security Essentials. Are there better ones out there, yes. But if a user gets frustrated with the chosen solution and eventually turns things off, then it is not the right solution.

As I did in the earlier days a project for a company, where one part was to test different antivirus programs against some self-written 'malware', I came to the conclusion that there is no 'best' program for this kind. As others already stated, it really depends on your needs and requirements, but also on your awareness and general behavior. If someone is not very familiar with computers at all, any security-software will add an additional layer of security and protection.Hiding malware from antivirus-software generally is not as hard as some people might think, though.